Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Read Like A Detective | Johnathan Chase | LinkedIn

Back in 2011, Lauren Resnick was introducing the keynote speaker, David Coleman, at University of Pittsburgh's Institute For Learning and she reflected on the early days of manufacturing the Common Core ELA standards...

" I remember being with Tony, who was there, when he handed out a list of ten – handed out a list of ten proposed standards that – at that moment seemed as reasonable as anything else for the new English standards that were gonna be forthcoming.

The first one said, “Read like a detective.” That‟s it. That was standard number one – so powerful a one that it‟s driven out of my mind the other nine....And we look at this and my memory is there was a long moment of silence, right, Tony? Do you remember that, too, David?

And what I really want to say is that reading like a detective is now part of our core standards. It‟s not there in words, but it informs – that was a kind of inventive way to put an idea on the table that established a standard..."

In 2012, David Coleman spoke about "reading like a detective" at a summer conference for teachers...

"David Coleman stood at a podium reciting poetry. After reading Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” a classic example of the villanelle form, Coleman wanted to know why green is the only color mentioned in the poem, why Thomas uses the grammatically incorrect go gentle instead of go gently, and how the poet’s expression of grief is different from Elizabeth Bishop’s in her own villanelle, “One Art.”

“Kids don’t wonder about these things,” Coleman told his audience, a collection of 300 public-school English teachers and administrators. “It is you as teachers who have this obligation” to ask students “to read like a detective and write like an Read Like A Detective | Johnathan Chase | LinkedIn: